catenary

A catenary is the shape that a rope or telephone cable makes, under the influence of gravity,
when suspended between two points. The word comes from the Latin catena,
meaning "chain," and was first used by Christiaan Huygens while studying the form of suspended chains.

Galileo thought the shape would be a parabola.
In fact, near the vertex a parabola and a catenary do look very similar.
When x is slightly greater than three however, the catenary begins
to rapidly outgrow the value of the parabola. The two shapes are related
in another way. If a parabola is rolled along a straight line, the focus
of the parabola moves along a catenary curve. Surprisingly, too, if a bicycle
with square (or any polygon-shaped) wheels is ridden along a road made of
upturned catenaries the wheels will roll smoothly and the rider will stay
at the same height! Another remarkable property of the catenary is that
its center of gravity is lower
than that of any curve of equal perimeter, and with the same fixed points
for its extremities.

The St. Louis Arch, which is 630 feet (192 meters) wide at the base and
630 feet tall, follows the form of a catenary, the exact formula for which
is displayed inside the arch: y = 68.8 cosh (0.01x -1), where
cosh is the hyperbolic cosine function.